Started a Troll Warrior on Realm 14 when the servers opened up. The starting zone went very smooth and was able to reach level 5 before Omar Thanosed 80% of the realms including the one i was on.
Remade the Warrior on realm 3 and spent a lot of time just trying to get 10 boars killed. I don’t have a lot of experience with Classic so leaving the starting area and grinding higher level mobs never crossed my mind. i was in a group of four friends throughout most of the first night and questing took a long time. Lots of dead bodies of quest mobs on the ground and getting tags was hard without anything instant to tag with. Named quest mobs such as Sarkoth and Zalazane’s spawns were surrounded by 4 or 5 5-man groups at all times. Everyone standing in a circle spamming their instant casts or start attack macros.
Sen’jin Village and Echo Isles quests were very contested as well. Tigers and Trolls were being massacred as soon as they spawned. I was the unofficial leader of our group and I made the bad decision of island hopping to look for mobs instead of camping one island and waiting.
I checked my /played before writing this and it took me 14 hours to get from 1-15. Did quests mostly and spent a little time in RFC trying to 4-man it with my friends (we were between levels 11-13, this went okay until Tara the felguard ate my lunch). There was some gnarly lag on day one at peak hours, looting and vendoring were the most noticeable issues during this time.
The one thing that bothered me was getting invited to a friends group and having all the mobs I had fought my way through instantly respawn at the same time and take revenge on me. I also killed my friend with an invite on a couple occasions. I know that this isn’t a good solution probably but perhaps when you get moved to a different layer you should be ported to the nearest Graveyard or something. It might keep you from killing your friends with invites but it also might alleviate some of the layer hop farming and gank evasion we have seen in the Beta. I know it would suck to get ported to a seemingly random area if you were questing when you take an invite from a friend who just logged on but it might save repair costs. The run back would probably be faster as a ghost though.
TL;DR
I enjoyed my time in the test very much. I think all my friends did too. We did get a little frustrated with the starting zone and the Echo Isles due to mob scarcity and the circle jerk that was trying to get a tag on named mobs. It smoothed out on day 2 though except if you get put in a new layer when you log in the game can feel pretty dead.